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A data-driven risk measurement model of software developer turnover

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Abstract

During the software development life cycle, the turnover of software developers is one of the critical risks that may lead to severe problems (such as postponement and failure of projects), which is often ignored by many professionals. To address this problem, we focus on the uncertainty of turnover risk of software developer (TRSD) and its loss incurred to projects. To tackle this problem, we propose a method to quantify the uncertain risks related to developer turnover, including resignation and replacement. Additionally, to calculate the extent of loss caused by TRSD, we employed machine learning, natural language processing, and data mining techniques to identify software development activities and establish the importance of developers by mining and analyzing the commit event logs. Moreover, based on the information entropy theory, we established a risk measurement model of TRSD that can be used to measure the risk level of each developer and the holistic risk of ongoing software projects. Finally, we validated the feasibility and efficacy through a case study.

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Notes

  1. https://www.tortoisesvn.net/.

  2. http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all anonymous interviewees and reviewers and appreciate their time and effort. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61662085, 61763048, 71972165), the Yunnan University Data-Driven Software Engineering Provincial Science and Technology Innovation Team Project (Grant No. 2017HC012), the 9th Post-Graduate Research Innovation Project of Yunnan University (Grant No. YDY17093), Science and Technology Foundation of Yunnan Province (Grant Nos. 2017FB095, 201901S070110), the Yunnan Provincial Natural Science Foundation Fundamental Research Project (Grant No. 2019FB-16), and the Yunnan University “Dong Lu Young-backbone Teacher” Training Program (Grant No. C176220200).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Yunnan University, Kunming, 650091, China

    Zifei Ma, Ruiyin Li, Rui Zhu & Ming Zheng

  2. School of Big Data, Yunnan Agricultural University, Kunming, 650201, China

    Tong Li

  3. Key Lab of Software Engineering of Yunnan Province, Kunming, 650091, China

    Zifei Ma, Tong Li & Rui Zhu

  4. School of Information, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, 650221, China

    Rong Jiang

  5. Kunming Open College, Kunming, 650233, China

    Juan Yang

  6. School of Information Science and Technology, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, 650500, China

    Mingjing Tang

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  1. Zifei Ma
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Correspondence to Rui Zhu.

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Ma, Z., Li, R., Li, T. et al. A data-driven risk measurement model of software developer turnover. Soft Comput 24, 825–842 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-019-04540-z

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